The “automobile exception” to the warrant requirement is an exception dating back to 1925. Under this exception, law enforcement may search your car, without a warrant, based on probable cause alone. In Carroll v. United States (1925), the Court justified this exception by pointing to the inherent mobility of automobiles. Because an automobile may be “quickly moved” by the time law enforcement retrieves a warrant, no warrant is necessary. In South Dakota v. Opperman (1976), the Court further justified this exception by describing the reduced expectation of privacy afforded to automobiles. The Court reasoned that because automobiles are subject to “pervasive and continuous regulation”—such as periodic inspection, licensing requirements, and police stops—people do not expect as much privacy in their automobiles.

If the Court decides to apply the automobile exception to curtilage, it may signal an erosion of fundamental Fourth Amendment protection to the home in favor of effective law enforcement. Because the home and curtilage are interchangeable for Fourth Amendment purposes, law enforcement could theoretically search an automobile even inside the home itself. If the Court decides not to apply the exception, some may view it as an erroneous obstacle to effective policing. It might seem arbitrary that police can search a vehicle parked on the curb, but not one parked mere feet away on the driveway.

Whichever way the Court decides, Collins v. Virginia will have important implications for the Fourth Amendment balance between effective law enforcement and privacy.

This issue concerns the interaction of two federal statutes—the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The FAA provides that an agreement to submit any dispute to arbitration “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.” 9 U.S.C. § 2. Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA states, “[i]t shall be an unfair labor practice to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 7.” 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(1). The rights guaranteed by Section 7 include the right to engage in concerted activities for mutual aid or protection. 29 U.S.C. § 157.

At the oral argument, the Department of Justice and the NLRB joined the argument, with the DOJ arguing in support of the employers and the NLRB in support of the employees. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Alito appeared to side with the employers’ position that class waivers in employment arbitration agreements do not violate the NLRA, with Chief Justice Roberts expressing concern that a Supreme Court ruling finding such waivers unlawful would render approximately 25 million employment agreements invalid.

Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan appeared to support the employees’ position saying otherwise. Justice Ginsburg stated, “To proceed alone in the arbitral forum will cost much more than any potential recovery for one. That’s why this is truly a situation where there is strength in numbers, and that was the core idea of the NLRA. There is strength in numbers. We have to protect the individual worker from being in a situation where he can’t protect his rights.” Justice Kagan stated that, under the NLRA, “employers can’t demand as conditions of employment the waivers of concerted rights.”

Interestingly, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, the two most conservative Justices on the bench, did not ask any questions. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision by June 2018. The transcript of the oral argument can be found here.

McCleskey v. Kemp was decided on April 22, 1987, and yet the 30 years that have elapsed since Justice Powell circulated his majority opinion have done little to soften McCleskey’s sharp edges. The case concerned a challenge from a death-row inmate to the administration of capital punishment in Georgia, where he had been sentenced for the killing of a white police officer. McCleskey argued that his capital sentence was driven in large part by his race, in combination with the race of his victim, and that these considerations violated his constitutional rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. As evidence, McCleskey proffered a study demonstrating that a black man who killed a white man in Georgia received a death sentence 22% of the time, as compared to the 1% of death sentences in cases where the victim was also black. Writing for the majority of the Court, Justice Powell held that social science studies could not prove that there was an individual intent to discriminate against McCleskey during his prosecution or trial, and that his challenge was therefore deficient. McCleskey, having lost his case, was put to death on September 26, 1991.

Powell’s dismissive views of social science are still alive and well at the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Roberts recently demonstrated with his snide reference to “sociological gobbledygook” during oral argument on October 3. Professors Mario Barnes (UC-Irvine) and Osagie Obasogie (Berkeley) visited Northwestern’s campus last week to discuss their recent research on the Court’s handling of social science at the Northwestern University Law Review 2017 Symposium, A Fear of Too Much Justice.

Prof. Barnes speaks while other members of the panel look on.

Prof. Barnes began the discussion by comparing McCleskey’s handling of social science with the Warren Court’s use of research data in Brownv. Board of Education (1954). In Brown’s (in)famous footnote 11, the Court cited the so-called “doll studies,” which purported to prove that children of color had lower self-esteem than white children. Since Brown, the study’s findings have been challenged on a number of fronts, and the Court’s treatment is considered overly credulous by some scholars.

By contrast, McCleskey saw the Court attempting to bury the findings of a methodologically sound study so that the majority could reach their desired result, namely, upholding the death penalty in Georgia without regard to its racially disparate application. For Barnes and his coauthor, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (U.C. Berkeley), these cases demonstrate that the judiciary needs to adopt better norms about the use of social science in the courts. Data should not be a cudgel used to promote a judge’s own presuppositions, nor should it be an obstacle that a judge need only argue around to reach their desired result. Social science should instead inform a judge’s thinking while they consider legal and factual issues, serving much the same function that economics now does in the courtroom. Barnes advocated for the adoption of standards at the Supreme Court concerning when a judge should allow social science to enter the record, and for how that science could be objectively considered, taking the expert testimony standards from Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993)as a model.

Prof. Obasagie introduces the symposium.

Professor Obasogie, joined on the panel by his coauthor Zachary Newman (U.C. Berkeley), took a different approach to critiquing the majority opinion in McCleskey. In their view, McCleskey’s result did not come because of (or in spite of) the Court’s handling of social science, it was instead driven by a desire to narrow the judicial consideration of ‘intent’ in the context of discrimination. The authors argued that state-sanctioned killing—either a capital sentence imposed in court, or a police shooting in the street—is always the result of a societal structure. In McCleskey’s case, the public of the state of Georgia had an intent to erect the racially discriminatory structures around capital punishment, and it had an intent to maintain them, despite their demonstrably worse effects for black men. And yet in a series of decisions, the Court atomized the meaning of ‘intent’ within the judicial system such that any consideration of larger social forces—the very forces that are captured and measured in social science—was useless in finding intent. Thus McCleskey, alongside Washington v. Davis (1976) and Graham v. Connor (1989), removed racially discriminatory social structures from the judiciary’s purview, effectively gutting the possibility of any future interventions on the scale of Brown.

To sum up his discussion, Prof. Obasogie asked the audience, “After McCleskey, what’s left to protect people of color in America?”